Categories
politics

Self-persecutory Pathology in Autocratic Imperialism

The curious thing about those who seek to leverage political capital from conflict is that this represents an atavistic ideological “business model” that in such a deeply interdependent world, all actions and aggressions return – amplified – to the actor. Even more so, in such an intricately entangled social, economic and technological context in which […]

Categories
history

The Totalitarian Enigma

The enigma of the totalitarian state is that it must constantly invoke by provocation precisely those threats and fears that its ideology is founded upon to validate the brute-forced tyrannical exploitation and mobster-kleptocratic oppression of its own people. It is a cycle and spiral of sheer absurdity that would be fascinating to observe as the […]

Categories
culture

Blemish

Marcus Aurelius once wrote that the very worst a person could do in life is to make themselves into a kind of blemish upon history and the world. We do not have to think very long or hard to find contemporary examples of just such an abhorrence and regrettably misanthropic wart upon all of history […]

Categories
history

Culture as Error, History as Misunderstanding

We are so entrained to think in terms of cultural continuity as a measure of successful system self-replication that we might never perceive or understand that the most significant moments in any history are shaped more (or at least as much) by difference and dissonance than by continuity and predictability. These stochastic inflections points of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Erasure

Even as technology provides us the arc and contour of combinatorial individuation, it reduces us to a mere shadow, superficial reflection and fading memory of our own experience.

Categories
Philosophy

Language fails us…

Language optimally self-propagates as a function of the instruction set encoding failures by and through which ambiguity, doubt, uncertainty and innumerable other apertures of opportunity to explore the phase space of all possibility persist. This is also how genetic information reproduces both through and as us. Notice here that the closure and certainty we so […]

Categories
life

The End

A feeling of synchronicity. A flash of light and a howling wind. Fire, darkness, confusion. Screaming, suffering, burning, crushing and chaos. A metallic taste and cells being slowly cooked from the inside by radioactive fallout. Oblivion and forgetting. My greatest fear has always been this horror. Not because I will cease to exist although no […]

Categories
life

The King that Fell

Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]

Categories
history

Palace of Lies

The autocrat’s gambit is to create a vacuum between fact and fiction and there, in worlds and words of half-truth and twilight misrepresentation, to leverage this difference and there make for themselves a golden palace of power and lies. The amount of information and energy invested in obscuring the facts will eventually be measured in […]

Categories
history

Russian Revolution

It didn’t work out all that well the last time it happened and notwithstanding that nothing is quite so human as the cyclical cadence of recurring ideological catastrophes, but I honestly wonder how long a government can grind their people into the dust of poverty and oppression before they rise up and find their own […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

World Peace

If it were not so utterly catastrophic, this situation would be as fascinating now as it might be to some future generation of historians. The combinatorial entropy as intractable complexity of conflict being what it is, and the perennial failure of institutional language (or individual cognition) to adequately represent (or assert control upon) it, what […]

Categories
culture

Please, give peace a chance…

I can not lie, this European war is already a monumental catastrophe but it does not have to get worse. Please stop this war. No one can win. No one ever truly wins wars and even if this a truth we are all still yet to fully acknowledge, please reflect deeply upon it because it […]